Art is Patient seminar series for health professions learners

People are complicated.  Art is strange.  They’re both challenging: often opaque and multi-layered and hard to read.  People and artworks might show up with their labels up front, but what do labels really tell us?  As clinicians or as viewers, how do we approach and understand these complex beings as insightfully and respectfully as possible?

Art is Patient introduces learners to a series of steps to approach art in a museum.
These steps help us explore the ways we encounter people in our clinics and offices.  The course proposes that relating to art and to people in meaningful ways doesn’t require specialized background knowledge.  Rather, it requires something we can learn together: an open-eyed and open-minded way of engaging.

The seminar series turns the Art Gallery of Ontario into a dynamic lab for visual literacy.  In each of three linked sessions, we engage with one or two pieces of artwork.  The art tells us what we need to know about seeing, witnessing, and engaging in the context of care.  The museum allows artworks to clarify the professional/patient relationship in ways the clinic can’t. In this alternative space we can question and understand our roles with one another -- without the usual pressures to know, or to perform, or to explain.

Activities:

• Guided close observation of art
• Group discussion and
• Reflection via mark-making
   

Goals:

• Foster cognitive skills such as description and interpretation (and better understand the distinction between the two), critical thinking and metacognition
• Sharpen technical abilities such as close observation, diagnostic acumen, pattern recognition and the perception of non-verbal cues
• Deepen interpersonal skills with both patients and colleagues, such as collaboration, social awareness and humility
• Nurture humanistic qualities such as tolerance of ambiguity, curiosity, creativity and self-reflection
• Understand the role of embodied witnessing in the practice of healthcare/medicine.

Seminar leader

Eva-Marie Stern, RP, MA, Adjunct Faculty U of T Dept of Psychiatry, is an art psychotherapist and medical educator.  She co-founded WRAP (within the Trauma Therapy Program) at Women’s College Hospital in 1998.  Her chapter, co-authored with Shelley Wall, “The Visible Curriculum”, appears in Health Humanities in Postgraduate Medical Education (Oxford U Press, 2018) and expands on how looking at and making art can vitalize learning in medicine.  She holds a Harvard Fellowship in Art Museum-Based Health Professions Education.  More at: www.artandmind.net

Time and place

3 sessions in sequence

6 to 8pm on Wednesdays April 9, 16, 23 / 2025
In person: Art Gallery of Ontario, 317 Dundas St West, Toronto

Enrolment:

• Open to all U of T Health Professions learners/residents on a first-come, first-served basis
• There is no cost for participation but enrolment is limited for a small group experience
• Attendance is expected at ALL THREE DATES
• No art experience is necessary
• Tickets are graciously provided by the AGO

For more information and to register, please contact: emstern@artandmind.net and indicate your year of study and specialty.